The next time you’re tempted to purchase a Happy Meal for your child, think about these photos. Food is SUPPOSED to decompose, go bad and smell foul…eventually. When I was a kid, I remember our garbage pail for the left over food scraps was kept by our back door. After a couple of days, flies deposited their larvae (maggots) in the meat. When I would lift the lid, I would see the recently hatched maggots wiggling on the putrid mess. A fly never bothered to land on the tiny hamburger patty on my office shelf.

Moral of the story: McDonald's food is so weird that even FLIES won't touch it! It's as unnatural and gross as we all suspected!

Or not.

Serious Eats' J. Kenji Lopez-Alt did a little experiment. And it turns out that McDonald's hamburgers don't rot, but neither do any other burgers -- even homemade ones:

Well, well, well. Turns out that not only did the regular McDonald's burgers not rot, but the home-ground burgers did not rot either. Samples one through five had shrunk a bit (especially the beef patties), but they showed no signs of decomposition. What does this mean?

It means that there's nothing that strange about a McDonald's burger not rotting. Any burger of the same shape will act the same way.